Monday, November 3, 2014

A day in the life of a Digital Learning Coach (Take 1)

Cheryl and Andrew have challenged me to blog about "A Day in the Life"... so here we go!

 (Read about the whole week: Day 1,  Day 2Day 3Day 4Day 5)

Mondays are my "planning" day for the week - I don't usually have any pre-scheduled meetings for most of the morning, and I can set things up for the week, review what my fellows are working on, etc.  I only have one "official" coaching meeting in the afternoon.  We set it up this way so we don't have to worry about rescheduling meetings every time there is a Monday holiday.

7:20am - arrive on campus. It's all decked out for Homecoming Week.  I'm impressed with the amount of work put into it - each class took a hallway and completely took it over with posters and decorations

7:25am - Say hi to the office staff, check in with how the weekend went.  Talk about what to do with the leftover candy.  I shouldn't eat it, but I have been. Argh.

7:30am - Computer just gets turned on. AP walks in to ask about an option besides PollEverywhere to use for grade level meetings since there is a limit of 50 participants.  I tell him that I think Socrative will work, and log on to my teacher account and 3 student accounts in different browsers to test out the live results.  I tweet out to see if there are any limits or issues to how many students can be in a class at once since I didn't see anything in my quick reading through the website.


8:00am - finally get to my emails.  There is a teacher who tried out Haiku Assessments after my training on Friday but is having issues. I check things out from my end and then head over to his classroom to figure out the issues.  We resolve it (too late for this class period), but he is set up for the rest of the day.

8:30am - Pop in to my weekly admin email and give them an update on Hour of Code, our Beckman Tech Team, PD from Friday & plan for the teacher work day next Monday, and plans for students without laptops.

8:40am - Back to my emails. A teacher needs help with her Haiku pages.  I need to look at the PowerPoint for the Math Subject Area Council Meeting this afternoon.  We need to look into Google Hangouts via calendar invites instead of through the Hangout App since that is blocked in our district. Fun stuff.

8:43am - Bell rings. I am visiting one of my fellows' classes today to provide support with students using the discussion board.

9:05am - Back to my office to take care of emails.  Open up PowerPoint for later today and provide feedback.

9:17am - Research Learning Catalytics as a Class Participation tool after it was recommended to me on Twitter. Realize it's going to be too much of a pain for a teacher to start using even though it looks cool, so I decide to pass.  Back to the drawing board for a non-Class Dojo class participation app or program.

9:22am - Back to researching Socrative.  Find some cool ideas shared on their site about use in the classroom.  See here, here, and here.  I see in their user guide that
*Note – Socrative currently only supports up to 50 students in a room at one time. 
Darn it!

9:32am - Get excited about Socrative and start planning option Tech PD opportunities for teacher workday next Monday, including Socrative, Google Forms, and Doctopus.

9:50am - Take a break from working on PD workshop plan to help a teacher with Haiku. Helped her to make a class, add rosters, add content blocks, make a Padlet wall, embed it, hyperlink to actual wall, change the width on the embed code... fun stuff!

10:26 - arrive back at office. Got an email from a teacher needing help again with Haiku rosters and assessments. Log in to his account from the back end to see what is going on.

10:35 - Decide I need to actually visit the teacher to see what he needs and head there.  Chat with teacher for a minute to make sure I can mess around with whatever I need to from the back end and not mess up his class. Come back and start working on it.

10:46- Teacher stops by my office to ask about rostering a new Haiku class. We work through it together on my computer

10:52 - Back to on the previous teacher's issue.

10:58 - Head to library for break for student tech support (10 minutes late, but I needed to finish the previous issue before the end of break).

11:07 - back to office to continue working on previous teacher's issue.  Finally figure out all the quirks and get it all settled away so student scores show up and rosters are linked and set to use. Yay! I feel super successful for figuring it out.

11:40 -  Realize I have back to back meetings starting in 20 minutes and I better grab lunch.

11:45 - Eat my wonderful Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers meal while continuing to work on Tech PD opportunities agenda.

11:55 - Finish my amazing lunch and keep working on Tech PD opportunities agenda.

11:58 - Realize I need to update my Doodle Calendar for open appointment slots.

12:01 - Ok, back to work

12:05 - pause. Time for teacher meeting working with Haiku rosters (another one!)

12:09 - back to my office because the teacher wasn't there and door was locked. Argh.Back to work on Tech PD opportunities agenda.

12:21 - get an email from a fellow who needs help w/ doctopus.  Reply and say I'll be there in a few minutes

12:25 - one of my colleagues calls me back to help me with the Haiku rostering issues I was having earlier.  Yay for collaboration!

12:32 - head to my fellow's class to help with Doctopus questions.  Also get to talk about embargoing docs, sending feedback emails, and all that fun stuff.

12:45 - back to continue working on Tech PD opportunities agenda and email to staff.

12:51 - Finally finish Tech PD agenda and email. Sent out and waiting for responses!

12:52 - I love Google Forms! Already got my first signup!

12:55 - Teacher who wasn't in the room called and we rescheduled for tomorrow

12:58 - 3 responses! Yay!

1:01 - off to meet with a teacher who needs help with sound/webcam/skype for a virtual guest speaker event

1:19 - back!  Already have 5 responses and then a teacher requesting a department session on Monday as well. Replying and researching that.

1:30 - taking a 5 minute break :)

1:35 - My fellow I am supposed to meet with today during 6th period (1:37) stops in to see if we can postpone until Wednesday since she has a ton of work to get done w/ grades due this week.  Looks like I have more time to get things done. I showed her this blog post and she laughed :)

1:39 - finally a little down time.

Ok... so I stopped recording the minute by minute at this point (this was quite an interesting day, I just left the blog post open and recorded every time I did something).

I got some random work done, chatted with a fellow for about 15 minutes who just needed to talk through some stuff, and then left at 2:45 to drive to a different school for the Math Subject Area Council Meeting.  I was there from 3-4:30, and then I drove home!

What a day.  I didn't realize how crazy things were until I actually wrote it down.  I'm going to try this again tomorrow, although I have 8 pre-scheduled meetings (as compared to 3 today, of which 2 got postponed).  Should be a different but fun day!

Have I mentioned how much I absolutely love my job?















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